The Glass Town Game

  A stout man stood behind the desk, watching them with a raised eyebrow. His body, like everyone’s in Glass Town, it seemed, contained not one bit of flesh or skin. He looked like someone had stacked up all their spare bookends until they were as tall as a man and then given it two bronze magnifying glasses for spectacles. The handles of those detective’s glasses stuck out from the sides of his head at wild angles. Carved wooden hawks, fairies, griffins, trees, even miniature stacks of ceramic books made up his whole self: big ones for his ribs and his neck and his arms, thin, delicate ones for his fingers. His face was a huge, proud, jowly silver bust of a man with leafy hair and a mossy cravat etched into the metal. What held it all together? Charlotte wondered. The bookends, Napoleon’s bones and rifle-arms, his rooster’s pottery, the frogs’ armor, Mr. Bud’s leather string? What was inside? The idea made her skin prickle.

  “Ready the presses, Mr. Tree!” cried Mr. Bud with gusto, unclasping his coat and hanging it up on the rack. “We’ve got a right rough drafter here! Just riddled with errors! I don’t know how he gets up in the morning!”

  “Is that who I think it is?” said Mr. Tree, peering over his glasses at the still-closed volume of Brunty. He did not seem like the sort of fellow who worried much over anything, no matter how alarming that anything might be to everyone else.

  “Dunno,” answered Mr. Bud. “Do you think it’s Brunty the Inking Liar? Brunty of Godforsaken Gondalier, Can’t-Take-Him-Anywhere Brunty, Brunty the Spying Sack of Slime? Brunty the Miserable Fat Folio?”

  Even Charlotte was taken aback by such mean names for their prisoner. He hadn’t seemed that altogether horrible. Well, until he got to the part about feeding them to the rooster.

  “I do,” answered the bookend-man. “I do indeed.”

  Mr. Bud laughed and whacked the front desk with his leather-bound fist. “Then a happy inking birthday to you, Mr. Tree!”

  “Well, this is very exciting,” said Mr. Tree in the same calm, friendly voice. “A banner day for Bud and Tree! Four real live breathers as sure as I’m standing, a glorious victory for Glass Town, and here’s us wasting paper chatting with each other! Miss . . . ?” He indicated the book’s guardian with his silver eyebrows.

  She tried to curtsy, but Brunty was incredibly heavy. It came off much more like a stumble. She wondered how long Charlotte’s clever trick would last. Or perhaps Brunty only wanted them to think they had gotten the goods on him and was only waiting like a horrid old snake in the hedges. She squeezed the Magazine Man tighter. She was beginning to lose feeling in her arms. “I’m Emily. And this is Charlotte, Anne, and Branwell.”

  “I say, what exotic names! Next you’ll be telling me your mother’s called Leopard and your father’s Toffee Pie! Miss Emily, if you’ll follow me to Press Number seventeen—seventeen is free, isn’t it, Mr. Bud? Excellent. Don’t let go of Master Brunty there, now, not until I say. Manuscript transmission is terribly easy to stuff up, you know. Here we are.”

  The lot of them hurried along behind Mr. Tree, who took frightfully long steps for a man with such strange legs. He stopped at one of the dozens of backward-facing printing presses that lined the lobby walls. It was made of dark, stained wood gone ashen with age, shaped like an enormous heavy door frame with ponderous wooden screws and plates and blocks inside it instead of a room. The number seventeen glittered on the right plank of the frame in gilded letters. Mr. Bud and Mr. Tree took up positions on either side of the press. On the count of three, they each pulled a lever that wound a screw thicker than Anne’s whole body. The screw ground around and around until the gigantic machine groaned, rattled, creaked, and finally pulled out away from the wall. It just kept coming and coming, further and further, until it finally lodged against the glass wall like a desk drawer and stuck there. They could see all the mechanisms of the press now: the frame for holding pages, the copper plates, the boxes full of letter blocks, the ink jugs, the levers and chains and straight edges for keeping lines of print tidy. All the children were thrilled to stand so close to the impossibly marvelous machine that made books, that could make book after book, as many as you wanted, as many as you could think of! But each of them thought to themselves that, honestly, it looked rather sinister when you got close up to the thing. All those racks and screws. But they didn’t say a word of it. Mr. Bud and Mr. Tree were obviously very proud.

  Mr. Bud whipped out a golden ruler and began to measure Brunty, still clutched deathly tight in Emily’s arms. He talked cheerfully while he worked.

  “You see, my little felt bookmarks, Glass Town is a fabulously fair sort of place. We put our justice on one law at a time like anybody. Why, when a fellow goes bad, you can’t just throw him in the nearest dungeon and call it a day! Heavens, no! Barbaric! You gotta consider his backstory, his conflict, his motivations, his genre, his foreshadowing! Maybe he just got a bad draft. Not his fault. Maybe he fell into a plot hole, poor chap. Saddled with lazy clichés or an unlucky twist ending—could be any one of us, really. You can’t blame a book for its story. It’s only done what it was written to do. If the thing’s set in a cold and loveless house and it grows up to be cold and loveless, that’s just plot! If the poor scrapper began in a war-torn city with thirteen brothers and no bread or warm kindness for itself, you can’t expect it to end the way it would if it started out in a fine manor house in peacetime with songs round the piano every night! That’s just genre, and it’s a rare bird who can escape their genre. Everyone has to get from the Page One to The End one way or another. That’s just life!”

  “But not everyone’s a book like Brunty is,” Branwell frowned. It sounded like no way to run a criminal justice system.

  Mr. Bud and Mr. Tree frowned right back.

  “’Course they are,” said Mr. Tree.

  “Can’t say I like your tone,” said Mr. Bud. “It’s a bit offensive.”

  “How else do you explain people?” Mr. Tree exclaimed, stroking his silver etched muttonchops. “The way they are born into a variety of interesting situations and grow up and set out to make their fortune and fall in love and get married and lose everything and discover secrets and fall ill and get tangled up in plots that go nowhere and have long boring stretches where nothing much happens and children and motifs and colorful imagery, the way they start at the beginning and the way they stop at the end? Sounds just like a book to me. Sounds like every book I’ve ever read! How is anyone not a book like Brunty is? Just because old Brunter looks like one and you don’t? Very prejudiced thinking, young sir. If you continue that sort of thing in my presence, I shall have to ask you to leave.”

  Branwell didn’t think this made much sense, but he didn’t want to leave. He thought something dreadful might happen to the godforsaken Gondalier, and he wouldn’t want to miss it. No one talked this much before doing his job if it wasn’t going to be a little dreadful.

  “But!” Mr. Bud shook his knotty head to clear his mood and pressed on. “We have no prejudices against the slings and arrows of outrageous plot! Bad writing happens, what can you do? I’ll tell you what you can do! You can correct your paper, young man! You can revise it. You can edit it until it’s good. You can take up the very reddest of pens and mark up the whole mess. Deduct points for improper spelling, faulty logic, profanities, dangling punctuation! And that’s just what we’re going to do today. We’re going to correct Brunty! Rewrite his rough and ugly bits, cut out his quick temper and his violent tendencies, cross out his crimes, tighten up his themes, reorder his scenes, start him over nice and fresh and proper. When we’re done with him, he’ll be as harmless as a nursery rhyme.”

  The four children exchanged fretful glances.

  “But . . .” Anne whispered, nearly faint with the fear of contradicting constables, which was what they were, even if they didn’t say so.

  “Yes?” said Mr. Tree sharply. “Some problem?”

  “Well, it’s rather awful, isn’t it?” Anne breathed. “It’s rather the awfullest thing I can think of!”
r />   “No, it isn’t,” Mr. Bud snorted. “You’re only saying that because you don’t know what old Brunty did.”

  “We do so!” Branwell snapped.

  Mr. Bud crossed his arms over his chest. “Well?”

  “He stole something or another and told a few lies and got in fights and spied on people but everyone does all that when there’s a war on! I don’t see why Brunty should be treated specially rough.”

  “Sweet lad,” sighed Mr. Tree. “Sweet and innocent and dumb as a Christmas card. You haven’t the first idea. Bruntus there would eat you whole if he could, and not even list it among his crimes. Is it awful when your teachers fix up a composition you’ve written? Is it awful when your governess tells you to change one word for another in your dear clumsy little poem about love or souls or the moors or what have you, even if it’s a better word? Even if it’s the word you should have used all along? Or do you learn something from all that red?”

  Charlotte stood up for her sister, which meant standing up for Brunty. “Yes, it is awful. You’re going to go in with that red pen and make him not Brunty anymore. You’re killing him, really.”

  “Nonsensical! Don’t be so dramatic. He’ll still be alive! How can it be killing if he’s still alive? He’ll still be wretched old Brunter.” Mr. Tree waved his wooden hand in the air. “Just corrected. Edited. Fixed. He’ll be a better Brunty! A critically acclaimed Brunty! A Brunty for the whole family! Approved for all ages Brunty! Perhaps we’ll give him a new name, so as not to muddle his marketing. Something gentle and pretty. Heathcliff, perhaps. Or Edward. Or Leopard, after your mother.”

  “Mum’s not called Leopard,” mumbled Anne. How splendid it would be if she had been, though! The whole world was all over Marias and Elizabeths, but Leopard was someone special. Anne imagined her mother lying on the sofa in the parlor, curling and uncurling a long, spotted tail beneath her petticoats.

  Emily twisted her fingers together till her knuckles turned red. “But he needs all those rough and ugly bits. He’d be lost without them. He wouldn’t even know who he was. If you . . . if you rewrote us so that nothing bad ever happened, so that Papa was always smiling and we never had to go to School and it was never cold in Haworth and there never was a war and . . . and mother and our sisters never . . . never died . . . if you took all that away just because it makes us prickly and untidy and depressing and unwieldy characters . . . well, then Emily and Charlotte and Anne and Branwell wouldn’t exist anymore. Some other people would, people we wouldn’t even want to have tea with, whose shoes were always new and who never learned how to cry. We, us, would be gone. I know Brunty isn’t the very best person, but you can’t, you just can’t. He’ll never be good if he can’t choose to be nasty. It’s the choice that makes the good.”

  “Aw, well said, Em,” Branwell said, and gave her a pinch, but not a painful one. He could admit that the girls turned out a nice phrase now and again. He was gallant, after all. He chose to be gallant.

  “And what do you do to criminals in Breathertown?” Mr. Bud sniffed. He was rather upset at seeing his job so disrespected, but he tried to hide it.

  “Hang them,” Branwell said immediately.

  “We do give them a trial first!” Charlotte protested. “It’s all on the up and up! Everyone wears a wig and everything.”

  “Or we lock them up till they’re sorry,” Anne added quickly.

  “Or we send them to Australia.” Emily chewed the inside of her cheek thoughtfully. She readjusted her grip on Brunty. He was so intolerably heavy.

  Mr. Bud and Mr. Tree reeled backward in horror.

  “How dare you call us awful when you kill your baddies?” Mr. Bud huffed.

  Mr. Tree fanned himself to keep from fainting. “I’d wager this ‘Australia’ is just your fancy name for burying a criminal up to his neck in sand and waiting for him to die of his own accord, and/or vicious biting fire ants!”

  “It isn’t!” Charlotte insisted. “It’s a place on the other side of everything! It has kangaroos and a kind of an otter-thing with a duck’s face.” Between the kangaroos and the wigs, Charlotte began to feel that she was not helping their world to sound particularly upstanding or superior or even sensical.

  “Correcting is worse than killing,” whispered Branwell, half-terrified and half-impressed. “A fellow still lived, even if he died badly. An edited man never was.” If he’d stopped there, it would have sounded a very regal and moral statement. But he couldn’t stop himself. Words poured out. “I’m sure Papa and Aunt Elizabeth have wanted to edit me plenty of times since I was born. I’m sure everybody would rather I be much better than I am. Older and stronger and nicer and cheerfuller and handsomer and cleverer and abler, oh, ever so much abler!”

  “Branwell, no . . .” Charlotte said softly. She put a hand on his arm but he shoved her off.

  “Branwell, yes! You know it’s true. You’d all rather a new and improved edition of a brother! You were probably hoping for it when I woke up on that table in Bestminster, but I’m still me. I can never get away from being me and neither can you! Don’t try to be sweet. Papa would roll up his sleeves and get right into me if he could. He’d cross out all the painterly bits and paste in parsony bits instead. He’d make me obedient and ambitious and fix it so I never cried or screamed or kicked walls ever again.” He was blubbering now and he knew it, but he couldn’t stop. It’s very hard to squash your feelings down deep inside when you only came back to life at lunchtime. Resurrection brings the truth out in a person. “But he can’t fix me, he can’t, and Charlotte can’t make me brilliant and Emily can’t make me friendly and Anne can’t make me patient because I’m just Branwell, only Branwell, and if you subtract Branwell from Branwell you’re left with nothing.”

  “Hold fast, there, lad, no one is suggesting you get your pages clipped,” said Mr. Tree. Displays of emotion gave him rashes. He scratched his palm.

  “How many people have you corrected?” Branwell seethed.

  “More than a few,” Mr. Bud shrugged.

  “Less than a lot,” Mr. Tree demurred. “Really, if the idea gets you so worked up, I daresay you’ve never seen a hanging.”

  Mr. Bud grabbed the book of Brunty out of Emily’s arms. She struggled a bit, but the editor was frightfully strong. “You’ve no right to look down your inkin’ noses at our ways,” he sneered. “Nobody asked for your opinion. Do you argue with judges and suchlike where you come from?”

  “No,” all four of them mumbled. A tear dripped onto Branwell’s shoe.

  “Then what makes you think you can tell us off? How bloody like a breather, barging in and blathering on! I suppose you’d rather just let the unedited, unabridged, unexpurgated Brunty run wild? Or maybe you’d like to just kill him. That seems nicer, doesn’t it?”

  “Well, what has he done, specifically?” Branwell protested, his face red with shame. “Maybe just Australia . . .”

  Mr. Bud and Mr. Tree grimaced at them, shaking their heads. Ignoring the children’s protests, they hoisted Brunty up onto the frame of the printing press. They slotted him right into the spot where fresh new pages were meant to lie and wait to be inked. They bent down to unlatch one cover from the other. Of course, Brunty didn’t want to be opened just now. They pulled and pried, but the brass latches wouldn’t come free. Finally, Mr. Bud pulled his page-cutter from his waist. He stepped back, took a mighty swing meant to slice through the locks with one fierce stroke.

  “Wait!” pleaded Emily. It was too gruesome, to watch somebody get hacked open, even if that someone was mostly a book. That only made it worse, somehow. Emily would rather have hacked off her own arm than maim any of their books back home.

  “What for?” said Mr. Bud, his page-cutter still held high.

  Emily thought quickly. She was better at quick thinking than perfect thinking, if she was honest, but perfect thinking only got you good marks in School and good marks in School got you nothing but cold paper in the end. She took a deep breath and said, quite gra
ndly:

  “The Scurrilous Yet Stupendous (but Primarily Scurrilous) Chronicle of Brunty the Worst, Who in Gondal Is Called Brunty the Best. CHAPTER ONE!”

  Brunty’s ornate cover sprang open. As quickly as they’d seen him fold up into a book on the Keighley train platform, he unfolded his pages into arms and legs and a great round belly and a neck and a huge head. He was the Magazine Man again, with his newspaper collar and newsprint waistcoat and glossy illustrated great coat and his red ribbon nose. He twisted and bucked in Mr. Bud’s and Mr. Tree’s grip, hollering and groaning. But though they could hold on to his arms, the editors could not wrestle all of Primarily Scurrilous Brunty at once. He heaved up his long, fat paper legs and kicked them both soundly in the head. Mr. Bud and Mr. Tree let go instantly, streaming ink from their brows, cursing and shouting.

  Brunty breathed heavily, staring at the children. His black eyes glittered with malice behind his spectacles.

  “What did I do, you little brats? I won the war for Gondal. They just don’t know it yet!”

  “We don’t care about your silly war,” Anne said, turning up her chin.

  Brunty turned the great book of his head to one side. “Now, that is what society folks call a lie, Miss Gumflapper. I think you care quite a lot.” He turned his glare to Emily. His voice turned high and mocking. “Ask them who invented grog, Mr. Bud. Ask them who invented the Iron Duke. Ask them about their toys. And then once you’ve returned from the asylum with the keys to their cell safely in hand, you can see to me. Go on, I’ll wait.”